Sandy (Samantha Streets), who
happens to be ‘The Girl from the Naked Eye’ which
is this film’s title and the club she procures
from, is dead. This makes Jake (Jason Yee)
very sad. Jake was the guy that was hired to
drive her around to her various hooker gigs and
eventually became her… gee… big brother /
boyfriend? I know that sounds icky but
that’s kind of how their relationship
developed. Jake might not have been able to
save Sandy, but he sure as hell can avenge her so
let the noir rush in.

First order of business, meet
with some tough talking cops. Damn if they
don’t think that Jake had something to do with
killing that sweet little thing. Time to
shake them and head on down to the Naked Eye and
talk to club owner Simon (Ron Yuan). Simon
is sympathetic to Jake’s pain, and being that dead
prostitutes is bad for business he promises quick
action, but his action isn’t quick enough to
Jake’s liking.

But what was it about Sandy
that drew Jake to her so closely? Through
flashback we can she was a sweet kid, a vulnerable
kid, a girl who was nowhere near the age of
nineteen that she claimed to be and Jake felt a
kinship to her, like her brother. Plus they
had a lot in common, both damaged souls, with Jake
and his gambling debts and drinking problems, and
Sandy being a runaway teenaged prostitute.
It looks like Sandy wasn’t looking for a brother,
maybe a little more, but Jake being the honorable
type wasn’t going for that, and if he had those
feelings he kept them to himself.

Jake needs answers but to be
honest with you Jake’s negotiation skills are
pretty limited. So Jake bulls his way
through this seedy little town, a city where the
sun doesn’t ever seem to shine, and pummels,
punches, kicks, jabs, stabs, shoots, and punches
some more, be you friend or foe, to get the bottom
of why Sandy had to die.

On Jake goes, deeper into the
rabbit hole, beating people near to death on his
descent down that hole while searching for his
answer. He won’t like the answer. But
then could there ever be a satisfying answer as to
why a sixteen year old prostitute got
murdered? Probably not.

We enjoyed director Dave Ren’s
film ‘The Girl from the Naked Eye’, despite
the fact it doesn’t succeed all that well as
quality noir, but it does do a much better job
of catering to the most basic of my movie
needs, this being that it has good ass kicking
action and a fair share of gratuitous nudity.

As far as the noir part of
‘The Girl from the Naked Eye’ goes, not a lot
felt like it fit right, and this is a very
familiar kind of genre, like a Western for
example, where if something doesn’t feel
right, even if the audience member doesn’t
know what that something is, it’s not going to
come off right. Take star Jason Yee for
example. To get sidetracked a bit, Mr.
Yee received ‘… and introducing’ in the
opening credits but we’ve already been
introduced to Jason Yee since we… and
apparently not too many others…. have seen
‘Dark Assassin’ a few years back. But
back on point, while we here at the FCU are of
the firm belief that Jason Yee is a potential
action star whose time in the limelight is
long overdue, he’s still not all that great of
an actor. The character he’s playing is
damaged, he’s seen too many things and been
through too much and we need to be sold on
this character in the spirit of this, and not
just because he’s told us these things.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that
Jason Yee is a good looking guy… pause… who
looks a lot younger than his actual age and as
such doesn’t look like he’s been through half
of the things that we know his character has
had to have been through. The whole
exercise kind of hinges on us believing in his
character. Samantha Streets suffers from
the same problem as well, being a little too
adorable for the character she’s playing, but
it doesn’t affect her character nearly as
much. Partly because she’s a good young
actress, and also because they wrote her
character as very young so she can get away
with this a little bit more. Combined
with a narrative that was a little uneven in
desperate need of a bit of focus here and
there, we can see why the ingredients didn’t
blend together to create the perfect noir mix.

But even though the ‘The Girl
from the Naked Eye’ didn’t turn out to be the
hardboiled noir thriller than I think it
wanted to be, it was still a pretty darned
good action movie. Jason Yee might not
be the second coming of Humphrey Bogart, but
he’d wear Bogart out in a fistfight.
Plus he does have a natural charisma about him
which is why, in addition to his martial arts
skills, that he’d be on the short list of
headliners if I was a filmmaker making an
action movie. Ron Yuan’s fight
choreography was stellar, particularly a
lengthy brutal closing fight sequence that had
tinges of ‘Old Boy’ connected to it which we
will call an homage, not a rip off here at the
FCU, and the we did enjoy the look, atmosphere
and pacing of the film. In fact if Ren
and company had shuttered the noir and
narration angle and shot a straight revenge
action thriller, then almost none of those
reservations we expressed earlier would even
apply.

Regardless, we did appreciate
the effort and we have to give ‘The Girl from
the Naked Eye’ some style points. It was
a flawed film, to be sure, but an entertaining
one, to be sure as well.